Aidan Walker

33 Ways to Tickle Your Toes

#1 in a series of series: ’33 Ways to Tickle Your Toes’. For reasons unknown I have been in the habit of photographing my feet while doing stuff, usually in, on or around beaches, boats, the sea, the #NorthNorfolk marshes etc etc. 33 Ways is a picture-led (pixel-led) on-foot journey from #ScoltHead Island to #BurnhamOveryStaithe harbour. We start, naturally enough, with sand as soft as… soft sand
This is where the sand has been wet, has dried and grown a thin crust which breaks and your foot goes through to the softness below.
Oops no feet. Seal skeleton on the route, surrounded by evidence of other feet engaged in examination.
Got to get off the beach… which means bare feet on a mixture of sand and stones. Watch out for the chunky flints that get you on the instep. Unless you’ve been there for weeks without wearing shoes like we did as kids and the skin of your feet is now in serious need of attention. You still look cool though, striding around impervious while others limp and mutter.
Ah blessed relief. Banks of the shallow tidal creek (Island end) exhibit mixed hard sand, seaweed of the ‘Ophelia’s hair’ variety and intermittent – and avoidable – stones.
Stones fade away and the Ophelia hair seaweed gets thicker, offering relief to nervous feet
Woah baby! Where’s the sand? Ophelia’s hair covers the land
Ah, here it is. But with that tantalising ‘soft crust’ finish, as you can see from the footprint in the middle. Kind of firm … but kind of soft
… and now we’re getting on to the truly firm stuff, into which feet do not sink. Leave a print, yes. Sink? No.
Now it gets interesting. A well-trodden texture, sand hard enough but the salt has formed a thin layer. A marker of how long it has been dry between tides.

Few more to be going on with …

The beginnings of a new phase of the Multi-Textured Foot Adventure: we are about to enter the Marsh. Still sandy underfoot but you see the scrappy bits of marram grass and whatnot signalling the change. A veritable symphony of textures awaits our excited feets.
… but first, some nice hard compacted mud. The journey was undertaken after the tide had been low for some hours. If tide had been higher and the pix taken earlier, this bit would have been slippery sloppery, mixed with some helpful full-friction sand.
Grass helpful in the slippery sloppery stakes but mildly uncomfortable underfoot.
Nother ‘aha!’ moment. Grass ends, mud begins. But this is dried mud, acutely uncomfortable. With higher tide and earlier time as aforesaid, it would be a mini-slough. Can I make it to the friendly sand on the left?
Have navigated awkward ‘entry mud’ and found comparatively walkable patch. Again, far drier and easier than a few hours before.
Semi-comfortable grass, far from comfortable dried mud. Be seeing more of that in the next few, and not so dry either.
First of three wooden bridges. You only need to use two, one is teetering above the channel and a definite hazard. In my kidhood there were no such things as easy-peasy bridges. You had to scramble and stumble and pick your way across concrete blocks encrusted with cockle shells, dumped higgety-haggety in the channels. Soft feet beware.
Second bridge.

Hmm. Mud. Very wet, very thick and clingy, very black, and with a very specific ever so slightly putrid odour that fills my nostrils even now from 180 miles away. Stains the white shorts (anything) permanently; washing up liquid the only recourse, but not 100% effective.

More of the same … and yet it isn’t the same. A tad drier and therefore slightly browner. One of the many delights about 33 Ways is that no way is ever the same as it was even a couple hours ago. The whole land-water-seascape is always the same but always different, hour to hour even. This is why we love the Marsh; from the song ‘Scarborough Fair’: – ‘Tell her to find me an acre of land / ‘Tween the salt water and the sea strand…’ Which acre, of course, does not exist. The Marsh is neither land nor water.